Mental Breakdown; Russian authorities are sending critics to psychiatric wards. Speaking out now seems evidence of madness.

Byline: Owen Matthews and Andanna Nemtsova

Soviet doctors once joked that the best way to get thrown into a psychiatric hospital was to send a telegram to Leonid Brezhnev that was critical of the Russian leader. Now that old gallows humor might have to be resurrected. Doctors and Kremlin critics say over the past year at least 10 journalists, political activists or critics of local authorities have been wrongfully hospitalized in mental hospitals. And though forcible psychiatric treatment for political reasons is still rare, the Independent Psychiatric Association, a Moscow watchdog, says Russia's mental hospitals are routinely used by unscrupulous relatives and criminals to remove inconvenient family members for financial gain. "We see cases of psychiatrists taking bribes and faking diagnoses all the time," says Gennady Gudkov, a member of the Duma's Security Committee.

In some cases, hospitalization is seen as a way to resolve real-estate disputes or family quarrels. In two current criminal cases, doctors in Nizhniy Novgorod and Ulyanovsk are on trial, accused of committing old people to psychiatric institutions and selling their apartments for personal profit. (One defendant has pleaded guilty; the other says patients consented to the sale of their properties.) But increasingly, it is critics of authority who find themselves sent off to state hospitals. Yuri Savenko, head of the Independent Psychiatric Association, says he hears of new political cases almost every day. The most high-profile thus far involves Larisa Arap, a 48-year-old journalist in Apatity, near Murmansk, who had given an interview to a local newspaper in June that was highly critical of the region's state psychiatric hospitals. Arap was also an activist with the local branch of United Civil Front, a Kremlin opposition movement. In early July, she went to the hospital for a routine check-up required by law to renew her driving license. But, as she recalls, someone in the hospital called the police, and by evening, she had been committed to a psychiatric hospital, stripped of her clothes, tied to a bed and sedated. "Doctors told me that I would experience all the practices I had complained about in the papers," Arap told NEWSWEEK while still in the hospital. "They also told me that I was locked up for life." ...